Osbourne pledges £450m Budget to the Government Digital Service

It was announced in George Osborne's yesterday's Spending Review and Autumn Statement that the Government Digital Service (GDS) will receive a budget of £450m over the next four years which is a huge increase from this year's initial budget of £58m.

The move is to ensure that the GDS would remain a key part of the government's IT strategy and allow Whitehall to provide more digital services. It was also announced that a number of Government as a Platform (GaaP) projects had been approved with the focus being on Gov.uk Pay, a prototype digital payment platform that recently went into beta-testing and could be rolled out in the new year.

“The Government Digital Service will continue to act as the digital, data and technology centre for government, supporting departments as they transform their business operations, setting best practice and ensuring quality of services,” it read.

The GDS is responsible for many digital services concerning the Government including the GOV.UK website, replacing physical or paper documents with digital versions, choosing the right technology for the government and using measurement or analytics to improve and influence governmental decisions. The aim is to work with public, private and voluntary sectors to reduce the number of people lacking basic digital services by April 2016 and eventually have the option to pay for any government service online by 2020.

The move has been welcomed by many people in the IT industry including TechUK CEO Julian David who welcomed the government's commitment to digital transformation and services.

“The news of investing £1.8 billion in digital transformation, including an increased budget of £450m for the Government Digital Service is welcome evidence of the government’s commitment to digital transformation." he said. “Government and industry must work closely together to bring innovation to government.”

Despite the announcement in the Spending Review, the lack of detail in what the money will be going towards exactly has been questioned with Kable chief analyst Jessica Figueras leading the criticism.

“We’d suspect the extra cash will be spent on GOV.UK Verify, which will need to be scaled up fast to support new digital services across government, rather than being used to fund GDS-led development projects; but we won’t know for sure until more detail is available.”

It still remains to be seen whether this could mean more IT opportunities within the GDS as well as other areas within the Government's IT sector but it does show the government's focus on the development of digital services and innovation.